I’ve been constantly telling everyone I know about this since the patriot act was signed and basically 100% of people don’t care in my experience
They just want to be able to connect their phone and have their music/video available and think that because they are “not doing anything wrong” they don’t “have anything to fear”
I’m glad this site exists so I can just send it to people directly
Well, just the fact that you don't pay for the monthly cellular subscription these cars use should tell you all you need to know about who's the product in this situation.
Why rely on your car's built-in software for navigation? Smartphone navigation is going to be a lot better (in my experience) and Google, Apple privacy terms are greatly superior.
Huh? My 2019 vehicles have GPS that works completely without data uplink. Trouble is map updates (distributed on SD cards) are being discontinued in favor of cellular subscription services that don’t work in the desert.
I was pleased to that you can use the navigation with a data collection opt-out.
I was less pleased to see that they sneaked a "safety and maintenance" clause into the terms. The information they gather for that gets shared with insurance companies, social networks and data brokers.
There's no hiding in modern car it seems. I was hoping for better from a French company operating under GDPR but no.
You can't win, with all the car companies pulling this crap it's like fighting a surveillance cartel.
The only thing to do is keep my old car for as long as possible.
I don't think it's legal in EU. ePD essentially forbids reading information from the terminal equipment (like car) unless it's "strictly necessary in order for the provider of an information society service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user to provide the service". Even "safety and maintenance" would be hard to classify as strictly necessary for navigation.
Of course to enforce it you would need to complain to regulator in your country who then likely just tells them to stop it and that decision becomes effective years later after appeals. Many countries don't even fines for ePD violations.
> One thing i don’t understand is how pro-surveillance advocates don’t understand that the moment they are not behind the terminal, they are the target.
I think it's three things; (a) They're just being paid not to care, (b) short-termism, and (c) are naively hoping they get to stay in the club on the other end of the surveillance. Hard to convince nearly anyone to give up short term profit for long term societal benefits.
Cynically I worry we are seeing the decline of democracy and our new overlords are seeing that too (many accelerating it). Surveillance is necessary for control. The AI, mass surveillance, and drone combination is getting pretty scary TBH.
Pro-surveillance people were not born one fine day. They were conditioned for a decade making them believe sharing everything about their life is normal.
Spot on. I've continued to be astonished at how publicly many people choose to live, especially considering all the inevitable negative results which have been well documented for decades and continue to increase.
According to some, every generation is insistent to learn the negative results for themselves, which can be counted on to advance the erosion of privacy.
Despite this I do have hope for the current gen who seems more aware.
The horrifying thing is that those people are the real targets. Most people do what they're told and eat their slop. The juiciest fruits of spying come from being able to keep someone out of power, being able to put someone in power, and being able to control people who are in power.
Even when they're targeting consumers, they're targeting the consumers who control the purse, and the wealthiest are the most valuable. Mass surveillance attacks power that poses a threat established power.
Tapping everyone's phone is something that even with AI costs far more than it is worth. That's why you look for other, rougher indicators in order to make lists of people who get expensive surveillance. While "expresses opinions online" might get you on the list, "being a congressperson" is also definitely one of those indicators, or "being an executive at a medium-large business."
We're pretending like the real problem is that they're going to be able to find out that I really like hot dogs and then collude to charge me more for hot dogs online (which definitely is a problem) but the real problem is that you can tap the car of a senator, figure out they're cheating on their husband, and use that to get permission to murder a bunch of people in Ecuador (or Arkansas.) It's a complete loss of power except for the people at the top of the chain.
You can use someone's driving habits and/or phone info in order to set them up to be framed for a murder, or any sort of crime. Accusing people of sexual assault has always been a tool because there's no hard evidence that can be asked for by law enforcement, it's just mind-reading and deciding who you like; and you can trash somebody in the media without ever charging them. Now you have the full gamut of crimes with very convincing circumstantial evidence, and actual data forensic evidence, which can easily be planted.
The West has been run by graft networks, and since WWII it's been gradually flipping to be run by extortion networks. Graft networks are at least bottom-up - you pay for better; extortion networks are top down - you pay to avoid worse. It's a movement from a caricature of democracy to a caricature of dictatorship.
The person who is at the top will not have any cameras pointed at them. There will be no way for you to determine who they are. Their lieutenants will be the most blackmailed people on the planet. Having things that can be used against you, and having the ability to convincingly lie about why you're doing things will be the most valued quality that one can have in your career. We're mostly there already.
They will complain that their kids get threatened online and then demand id verification for everyone. Basically, they cannot and will not take responsibility for their own actions.
Some are conditioned, but I think there will always be a subset of people that just feel like they are the “right people” that everyone else should emulate. The system feels like it’s there to protect them, strong authority makes them feel safe, and they have a strong instinct to conform.
They’ve never been on the wrong end of a political witch hunt, colonized, or felt like they were being attacked for wrongthink, so they don’t understand why everyone else can’t just be “good, law-abiding citizens” like them. Seems utterly alien to me, but I’ve known more than a few.
I can’t even imagine the dystopia of the future where you are always on camera and due to LLMs you are constantly being monitored- your actions, your purchases, your social relationships, and you are graded as such constantly. We have the technology for this now, so if someone wanted, they could implement the above dystopia today.
It would be like creating an always present omnipotent God.
Resistance to money is futile. Just look around here. All of this shit was built by programmers while we argue about privacy, security, and surveillance endlessly. You can't fight the obscene big tech compensation.
The pro-surveillance advocates are the ones in government or running these companies. They can put rules in place to exempt themselves from being watched by their own hardware.
The unfortunate reality is we can expect more and more of our goods to spy on us over time, as there are both political and economic motivations to track and collect as much data as possible on everyone.
The best thing you can do is avoid products with trackers while they haven't taken over their entire market, learn to disable GPS, wireless, and cellular antennae once they do, and pray manufacturers take a while to insert dead-man switches as well.
Wouldn't disabling antennae on your car void the insurance? I would have assumed that was a basic thing insurance policies would have stipulated already over a decade ago.
for tesla insurance, yes. You have to agree for your driving to be monitored to use their insurance. They monitor and grade you based on a number of driving behaviors, then set your premium based on your score. You score determines the next month's premium. Note that the time you drive using tesla full-self-driving enabled, your score is 100% (even with the sometimes scary 12.x version)
You must agree to monitoring, otherwise they won't give you insurance.
I'd like to have a radio kill switch be required on all devices. The reason is that eventually, things that emit RF energy could be targeted by drones. That scares me.
It would be shocking if it weren't possible. Being a car does not confer any sort of magical protection against hacking because "it's just a car" or something.
I recently sold my Lincoln Navigator and bought a used 2005 Honda Odyssey (single owner before me, 115K miles and well taken care of). Good luck trying to spy on me. It doesnt even have bluetooth let alone all the other smarttech crap. Good old CD player and Radio.
I heard the argument that it was fine for social media to erect a censorship apparatus because private companies are not constrained by the first amendment. The same argument would seem to apply to the surveillance apparatus erected by the private companies not constrained by the fourth amendment. Is it both or neither?
I obtained my data via GDPR request from Audi. Despite having disabled telemetry and location services, remote access and so on on certain date, the car kept sending every destination address I wrote on the navigator to the motherbase. Other location tracking services did stop (i.e. no live positioning).
I'm still clarifying the purpose of this before making a complaint to the data authority.
Reasonable explanation. Why would they store them though once the traffic info is provided? I was hoping it has a "purpose", i.e. making the voice assistant more intelligent/helpful. But I need to ask about it.
If this tech was being used for traffic enforcement then I'm all for it. Unfortunately it seems like people will still be able to browse their phone behind the wheel and run over kids on bikes despite the surveillance
The world has collectively agreed to let the kids die. Old are eating the kid's earnings and putting them in more debt than any generation ever. Then there is the world itself is boiling and we are the frogs
The issue with privacy violations isn't how it is being used today, its how it may be used later and the precedent it sets for future invasions of privacy.
It's funny you including your tracking token so Google can associate your with a graph of everyone who clicks on the link (?si=)
You really need to look up the car and a lot of people sell replacement harnesses to terminate the built-in modems with resistors.
Sometimes if you hit the sweet spot, the car has a built in modem but its on 3G or EDGE networks that have been dismantled. There are several Subaru's like this. They no longer can connect to a network or transmit data.
Personally, I'd like to see someone salvage one of these modems and try to reverse engineer it for free Internet. It will probably be low speed and they might be locked to certain hosts, but I bet you could find some way to tunnel traffic on them.
My 1999 was so rusted that I had to junk it. My 2024 is about the same yearly costs to have because nothing is worn out or rusted away. (EV is also a lot cheaper fuel)
My car still uses 3G, so not much listening to it anymore.. although oddly enough, when I drive into the dealership, they automatically download vehicle statuses.
This is part of the reason why I don't want a new car: I don't want to be involved in this directly. A guy from work got a brand new Hyundai(I think), and the first thing that popped on the navigation was "Create an account with Hyundai now". Nah. Nah. Forget it. I have 3 issues:
1. I should not have to authenticate or have connectivity to a manufacturer unless I want to once I've paid for a physical good(cars being physical goods).
2. I don't want my personal data to be sold off to anyone - I've been in the tech industry for long enough to know that "I don't want my data to be shared with third parties" is worth as much as the power used to light up the pixels on the screen.
3. I don't trust anyone to have done everything carefully and by the books to prevent any potential leaks.
The connectivity may not be fully disabled in a 2025 Acura Integra, but there is a way to disable data sharing. You then have a permanent yellow "nag icon" top right on your infotainment screen, but the spying is "disabled." I mean what this other commenter in this same thread found via GDPR after doing this very step: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49955366
Auto manufacturers lost me when they began being so hostile to people wanting to maintain or repair their own vehicle.
Much of my 80s model pickup can be disassembled with a basic set of screwdrivers and wrenches. If my Chevy Volt bricks because the battery has an aging cell, it has to be towed to Chevy to pay $200 for them to turn of a software alert and allow it to charge.
I do like electric vehicles but its insane how absolutely terrible they are when it comes time to work on them.
> I do like electric vehicles but its insane how absolutely terrible they are when it comes time to work on them.
Yep, they are like hermetically sealed devices like a modern consumer phone. The user can get into them and repair if they really want to and have the skills/tools... but it's nothing like the previous era of phones or vehicles.
Even just knowing whether the car has a wireless connectivity device (i.e. modem or Wi-Fi chip) would be useful, since those were probably added at different times for different manufacturers.
They only looked at the domains the car talks to over wifi, not to the content. For a Tesla Model 3 they also looked at the mobile traffic, because it was easy doable.
They played around with the infotainment of the car for 30 minutes, when it has for example a YouTube app, they opened it. When the car talked to YouTube over Wifi they counted it as one ATA (Advertising, Tracking, and Analytics).
When you have less apps in the car, or all data is tunneled trough the car manufacturer it results in less ATA and therefore a better score.
The paper says this:
> 2. Stationary Active: The vehicle was parked and powered on for 30 minutes while we interacted with as many sensors and features as possible. This included opening and closing doors and the trunk, pressing dashboard and seat controls, activating stalks (lights, wipers), and exploring all infotainment menus and apps.
https://automatictransmission.khoury.northeastern.edu/paper....
It would be nice to have know which domains were accessed by which car. Even better would be to know which action in the car correlated with which connection.
Yes, I read this report and came to the same conclusion. What did they expect when they opened Youtube for example? Also, there was no implication that the ATA transmitted was any different than what you'd see in a regular browser e.g. the automotive companies aren't sending additional data when you open Youtube in your car.
These articles are useless because where is the search bar that lets me plug in my make/model and look at the specific results like cool research guys thanks for burying the lede in 3000k words
They talk about each manufacturer is different and the cars they make are all different. You can’t test a Lexus 350 and assume it’s the same as a 350h or 350h+. They tested a handful of cars and it cost a million usd.
Their point is that relying on consumer privacy groups to foot the bill for data collection is hard and we (at citizens) are owed transparency from auto manufacturers
At first I bought used cars because I was young and didn’t have any money. Later, I bought used because of the savings, and because it made getting a manual transmission easier. Now we still buy used, but avoiding this kind of thing is top of mind.
Our three family vehicles are 2016, 2016, and 2007. Somehow we live without built-in nav, CarPlay, and hundreds of square inches of screen space. At the rate things are going, I’ll probably live out my life without getting anywhere close to a new vehicle.
Think about it please, everyone. Do you need this stuff? Really need it?
92 comments
[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadThey just want to be able to connect their phone and have their music/video available and think that because they are “not doing anything wrong” they don’t “have anything to fear”
I’m glad this site exists so I can just send it to people directly
Implying that payment will stop the tracking is a red herring.
I was pleased to that you can use the navigation with a data collection opt-out. I was less pleased to see that they sneaked a "safety and maintenance" clause into the terms. The information they gather for that gets shared with insurance companies, social networks and data brokers.
There's no hiding in modern car it seems. I was hoping for better from a French company operating under GDPR but no.
You can't win, with all the car companies pulling this crap it's like fighting a surveillance cartel.
The only thing to do is keep my old car for as long as possible.
Of course to enforce it you would need to complain to regulator in your country who then likely just tells them to stop it and that decision becomes effective years later after appeals. Many countries don't even fines for ePD violations.
I don't want a lit-up screen in the car.
One thing i don’t understand is how pro-surveillance advocates don’t understand that the moment they are not behind the terminal, they are the target.
I think it's three things; (a) They're just being paid not to care, (b) short-termism, and (c) are naively hoping they get to stay in the club on the other end of the surveillance. Hard to convince nearly anyone to give up short term profit for long term societal benefits.
Cynically I worry we are seeing the decline of democracy and our new overlords are seeing that too (many accelerating it). Surveillance is necessary for control. The AI, mass surveillance, and drone combination is getting pretty scary TBH.
Pro-surveillance people were not born one fine day. They were conditioned for a decade making them believe sharing everything about their life is normal.
"What's on your mind?"
Except for those in power, of course.
Despite this I do have hope for the current gen who seems more aware.
The horrifying thing is that those people are the real targets. Most people do what they're told and eat their slop. The juiciest fruits of spying come from being able to keep someone out of power, being able to put someone in power, and being able to control people who are in power.
Even when they're targeting consumers, they're targeting the consumers who control the purse, and the wealthiest are the most valuable. Mass surveillance attacks power that poses a threat established power.
Tapping everyone's phone is something that even with AI costs far more than it is worth. That's why you look for other, rougher indicators in order to make lists of people who get expensive surveillance. While "expresses opinions online" might get you on the list, "being a congressperson" is also definitely one of those indicators, or "being an executive at a medium-large business."
We're pretending like the real problem is that they're going to be able to find out that I really like hot dogs and then collude to charge me more for hot dogs online (which definitely is a problem) but the real problem is that you can tap the car of a senator, figure out they're cheating on their husband, and use that to get permission to murder a bunch of people in Ecuador (or Arkansas.) It's a complete loss of power except for the people at the top of the chain.
You can use someone's driving habits and/or phone info in order to set them up to be framed for a murder, or any sort of crime. Accusing people of sexual assault has always been a tool because there's no hard evidence that can be asked for by law enforcement, it's just mind-reading and deciding who you like; and you can trash somebody in the media without ever charging them. Now you have the full gamut of crimes with very convincing circumstantial evidence, and actual data forensic evidence, which can easily be planted.
The West has been run by graft networks, and since WWII it's been gradually flipping to be run by extortion networks. Graft networks are at least bottom-up - you pay for better; extortion networks are top down - you pay to avoid worse. It's a movement from a caricature of democracy to a caricature of dictatorship.
The person who is at the top will not have any cameras pointed at them. There will be no way for you to determine who they are. Their lieutenants will be the most blackmailed people on the planet. Having things that can be used against you, and having the ability to convincingly lie about why you're doing things will be the most valued quality that one can have in your career. We're mostly there already.
It would be like creating an always present omnipotent God.
The best thing you can do is avoid products with trackers while they haven't taken over their entire market, learn to disable GPS, wireless, and cellular antennae once they do, and pray manufacturers take a while to insert dead-man switches as well.
You must agree to monitoring, otherwise they won't give you insurance.
https://youtu.be/DoP71LeQt3o?si=eSWRTaBYmzAOPWEz
Fast forward to today: getting access to the canbus (e.g. via headlights) allow you to steal the car: https://www.theregister.com/security/2023/04/06/how-thieves-...
Given the integration of these modules, is it that weird that you could send signals the other way?
No, but there are simple solutions to this: a firewall, which is how this has been fixed on some cars.
You trust state actors to not force them to not get it right?
Why would it be shocking?
It would be shocking if it weren't possible. Being a car does not confer any sort of magical protection against hacking because "it's just a car" or something.
https://blackhat.com/docs/us-17/thursday/us-17-Nie-Free-Fall...
https://i.blackhat.com/Asia-25/Asia-25-Evdokimov-Remote-Expl...
I'm still clarifying the purpose of this before making a complaint to the data authority.
that would create hell on earth.
The issue with privacy violations isn't how it is being used today, its how it may be used later and the precedent it sets for future invasions of privacy.
>Cybersecurity experts hack and take remote control of SUV (2015)
https://youtu.be/DoP71LeQt3o?si=eSWRTaBYmzAOPWEz
You really need to look up the car and a lot of people sell replacement harnesses to terminate the built-in modems with resistors.
Sometimes if you hit the sweet spot, the car has a built in modem but its on 3G or EDGE networks that have been dismantled. There are several Subaru's like this. They no longer can connect to a network or transmit data.
Personally, I'd like to see someone salvage one of these modems and try to reverse engineer it for free Internet. It will probably be low speed and they might be locked to certain hosts, but I bet you could find some way to tunnel traffic on them.
You/HN: That's important to know
Normies/non-techies: Not only do we not understand your above-quoted statement, it might as well be written in Urdu.
With diesel the price it is, driving a 4.6 litre V8 that runs on propane is like driving a diesel that gets over 45mpg.
1. I should not have to authenticate or have connectivity to a manufacturer unless I want to once I've paid for a physical good(cars being physical goods).
2. I don't want my personal data to be sold off to anyone - I've been in the tech industry for long enough to know that "I don't want my data to be shared with third parties" is worth as much as the power used to light up the pixels on the screen.
3. I don't trust anyone to have done everything carefully and by the books to prevent any potential leaks.
Much of my 80s model pickup can be disassembled with a basic set of screwdrivers and wrenches. If my Chevy Volt bricks because the battery has an aging cell, it has to be towed to Chevy to pay $200 for them to turn of a software alert and allow it to charge.
I do like electric vehicles but its insane how absolutely terrible they are when it comes time to work on them.
Yep, they are like hermetically sealed devices like a modern consumer phone. The user can get into them and repair if they really want to and have the skills/tools... but it's nothing like the previous era of phones or vehicles.
They played around with the infotainment of the car for 30 minutes, when it has for example a YouTube app, they opened it. When the car talked to YouTube over Wifi they counted it as one ATA (Advertising, Tracking, and Analytics).
When you have less apps in the car, or all data is tunneled trough the car manufacturer it results in less ATA and therefore a better score.
The paper says this:
> 2. Stationary Active: The vehicle was parked and powered on for 30 minutes while we interacted with as many sensors and features as possible. This included opening and closing doors and the trunk, pressing dashboard and seat controls, activating stalks (lights, wipers), and exploring all infotainment menus and apps. https://automatictransmission.khoury.northeastern.edu/paper....
Their repository has the classification of vendors here: https://github.com/nicolegerzon813/Automatic-Transmission-An...
It would be nice to have know which domains were accessed by which car. Even better would be to know which action in the car correlated with which connection.
Their point is that relying on consumer privacy groups to foot the bill for data collection is hard and we (at citizens) are owed transparency from auto manufacturers
Our three family vehicles are 2016, 2016, and 2007. Somehow we live without built-in nav, CarPlay, and hundreds of square inches of screen space. At the rate things are going, I’ll probably live out my life without getting anywhere close to a new vehicle.
Think about it please, everyone. Do you need this stuff? Really need it?